Screened just once in the UK on BBC2 in June 1982, Jindřich Polákc’s lever, witty 1977 Czech time travel movie – yes, that’s right – quickly slipped into obscurity but the memory of it quietly lodged itself in the back of the minds of those who unexpectedly caught this sole UK outing, this reviewer included. Images of a clumsy-looking, military-style time machine standing in a snowy landscape surrounded by curious Nazi soldiers lurked for years in the dark recesses of the brain so the opportunity to not only finally put a name to this oddity but also to be able to see it again on this new Blu-ray from Second Run is proof that miracles can still happen, even in the middle of a world gone mad.
In the (presumably) near future, time travel is a reality and holidaymakers can journey back to any era they wish to get their jollies. A group of rather incompetent neo-Nazis hijack a ‘rocket’/time machine to return to 1944 where they plan to deliver a hydrogen bomb to Hitler to enable him to turn the tide towards the end of World War II and thus change the course of history. They have enlisted the aid of a sympathetic time machine pilot, but on the day of the launch he inadvertently chokes to death on a stale bread roll and, in a moment of sublime madness, his dowdier twin brother decides to adopt his late brother’s persona and pretends that he has died instead. Thus is set in motion a chain of events that are alternately slapstick, knockabout, dramatic and at times even a little disturbing. The scheme goes horribly wrong when the machine deposits them in 1941 instead of 1944 and bemused pilot Jan (Karen Bures) returns to ‘the present’ allowing the story to cleverly take a turn for the timey-wimey that Doctor Who supremo Steven Moffat himself would surely approve of.
Tomorrow… is great fun even if it isn’t quite the film we remember and the stark images we recall are only a small part of the larger scheme of things. But the story is wickedly anarchic, performances are often wide-eyed and over-the-top and the special effects and music are charmingly naïve. Despite its comedic elements, the time travel aspects are wonderfully convoluted with scenes of two versions of the same person existing at the same time and the same events often told from slightly different perspectives. Huge kudos to Second Run for exhuming this delicious half-remembered curio and even the new transfer, full of pops and blemishes and the odd jump-frame, helps to evoke the homespun nature of the entire production and conjures warm memories of that strange June evening nearly four decades ago when an unexpectant discerning audience discovered this mad, irreverent, and frankly absurd minor sci-fi classic and then promptly forgot all about it.
